Firefly

A memory returns to the day a young Rosine, ragged and clutching an unused beherit, first raced joyfully into the Misty Valley that would become her sanctuary. In the present she rages that no human should ever harm an elf and charges the falling Guts with her whip drawn out like a lance, aiming to run him through while he cannot dodge in the air. He catches sight of the point at the last moment and jerks his head, so that instead of a fatal hit the spike pierces one cheek, crosses his mouth, and juts from the other. Biting down to trap it, he brings the Dragon Slayer down over her, splitting her torso and lopping off her left arm before he drops unconscious.

Her pain forgotten, Rosine recalls parents who were never present and who drove her off. She had sat alone in the valley, aware elves did not exist yet clinging to the fiction to excuse her flight. When her parents finally found her by the lake, her mother embraced her while her father struck her, raging at the shame of the villagers searching for her and asking whether she fled because he was not her true father. He turned the same beating on her mother, and the watching Rosine willed such cruelty gone from her haven; the blood spilling from her mouth fell on the beherit and awakened it.

Guts sinks into the lake as Rosine flutters back to her cedar-tree perch, once more nearly human and missing an arm, silently pleading for her parents' pardon. Jill rushes to her, and Rosine confesses the elves were only ever imagined. Puck darts before her to introduce himself as a true elf, one of the kind that dwelt in the valley long before she claimed it. As Jill cradles him and Rosine reaches to touch the first real elf she has known, Guts erupts from the water, still gripped by his rage.

A flashback shows Rosine's beherit activating amid her father's abuse, making her an Apostle. Guts takes her stinger through his cheek to hold her still, then cleaves her torso and severs her arm. The dying Rosine admits her elves were never real, and Puck reveals himself as a genuine elf before Guts bursts from the lake.

Included in Young Animal issue 4 on February 13, 1998, this twenty-one-page Conviction Arc chapter delivers Rosine's tragic origin and the turning point of her battle with Guts.